It isn’t until the wonderful Gladstone comes along with her aching tomboy heartache and sad seeking eyes that the film finally burrows below the surface and finally hits a dramatic nerve. Unfortunately, by then, it’s too little too late.

As it is, the story collapses like a bad tip to Liz Smith. Still, there's something brash, retro, and even stupidly touching about all the chatty mania, and the way Baitz and Pacino get off on paranoia, conspiracy theories, and the lure of 1960s idealism.

Jolie Pitt, who also wrote and directed, shows a lot of skin (her own and her cast’s) without ever really getting under it. Misery doesn’t just love good-looking company; it needs an emotional center and a satisfying narrative arc, too.

The frankly preposterous nature of the film’s setup is rendered slightly less so by a couple of second act reveals. But, by then, many viewers will have lost interest in a movie with a very high bodycount but a very small amount of grit, either emotional or literal.

Megan Leavey is one of those strong-arm soaps, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that it has a certain secret weapon in the forced-waterworks department—an adorable bomb-sniffing German shepherd. All together now: Awwwwww.

There are fun moments, especially with Kristin Chenoweth’s vampy poison dart frog. But with more evolved films like "The LEGO Movie" and "Frozen" in the animated ecosphere, overstuffed and gag-reliant time-passers like the Rio movies feel like a dying breed.

That Cruise fails to make a case for Reacher's allure, though, has less to do with physical dissonance than it does with the film's inability - stupefying inability, really - to otherwise make a case for the character's originality in a movie so choked with visual clichés and dreadfully moldy dialogue.

Ratter definitely delivers an effective paranoia creep-factor towards the end, but first, the audience has to get through about 45 minutes of just watching Ashley Benson cook eggs, shave her legs, and dance in her living room.

Connoisseurs of digital animation, graphic novels, and the history of dystopian art will have plenty to discuss about Christian Volckman's visually striking, technically impressive black-and-white animated feature Renaissance…But no one will be talking about the movie's banal plot, the trite dialogue, or any of the indistinguishable characters who offer a bleak futuristic vision of cinema that's all style, no soul.